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New search engine - Bing.com by MS

I do not know whether you know it, but ...In the last few years we have seen various search engines come and go. The last one I remember on is Cuil. Last year, Cuil made its way on the web. As with it goes rather with everything online, as soon as some kind of new service application or technology gets released, the initial spontaneous reaction from the community was to make the obvious comparisons between the new one and the familiar applications. Not only was Cuil not a Google killer, it could hardly compare with some of the second-tier search engines on the market. In the end, Cuil got a ton of great PR that only reinforced something most of us knew: Google was still a very strong search engine and very tough to beat. The other big (and obvious) players are MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com and maybe perhaps AOL, for the still existing AOL followers and users. In the US and Canada, Yellow Pages and in Germany T-Mobile is also a very big mentionable player.

And we all recognized the several improvements, search and filter tools, on Google during the last few months.

This leads to the question: What will it take to topple Google?

During the first dot com increase in the mid-'90s, it was an endless story, every day a further article on the "search engine wars." At the time, both Yahoo and MSN were battling it out, while AOL was losing traction and Google was just coming on to the scene.

Best-selling business book author and marketing expert Seth Godin had an excellent blog post titled The Next Google where he said:"Bing, of course, stands for But It's Not Google. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It's called Google. Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this: Don't try to be the 'next.' Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new."

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch took a different approach in his blog post titled Apparently Bing Is Something Of A Hit:"Whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in 'winning' the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to invent useful new features. And search marketing competition will ensure that Google doesn't get too filled up or tired. We don't need Microsoft to win, but we do need to avoid a world with just one search engine that matters. Maybe Microsoft can win that lesser war, at least.

As if that weren't enough excitement, two other search engines recently came online as well. WolframAlpha ( http://www.wolframalpha.com ) bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine" and acts as an amazing place to find answers to questions that require more calculation-like answers (e.g. - how far is Montreal from Copenhagen?), and Topsy ( http://www.topsy.com ) - which is more of a social Web search engine that is able to list and rank conversations from places like Twitter and Digg.

What do consumers really want when it comes to search? Finally, we all want relevant results from a reliable provider. As the game changes (and it always does), it's going to be interesting to see who the real Google Killer is, or we'll see if Seth Godin is right and Google eventually eats itself.

I particularly enjoyed the map search of Bing and its options to get a different view of areas and maps.

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